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Topic: Remastering (Read 1050 times)

Have you ever bought a remaster that had no discernible improvement over the original recording? I've bought recently a rock album where the original could have used some significant bass and volume tweaking, and the remaster is totally useless. This is a small independent label so I don't think they were just trying to extort more money out of the fans like the major labels are notorious for doing. Any thoughts?

Quite different. It generally involves quite a bit of subtle reshaping of the overall sound that is already in mixed form. It could involve adjustments to EQ, overall balancing, mild compression and denoising, among other things. Robert Rich, for example, does a lot of nice work with mastering.

Say you create this beautiful wood sculpture and your happy with it but its not quite finished......now its ready to be sanded, stained, lacquered and polished so that all the deep grain, subtle tones and inner glow that wood can have are expressed and the piece of art is experienced at its fullest potential....this is what a mastering engineer does except to music. It is very complexed and subtle, requires great ears,an acoustically treated room with often audiophile speakers, amps and cabling as well as specific types of equalizers and compressors and pristine converters to enable the mastering engineer to "look" inside the music.

Remastering can refer to where the music was produced for vinyl and needs to be prepared for a digital medium and unfortunately can lead to a modern approach of excessive distortion commonly found in current rock & pop music. It can also refer to more of a revisiting of the music. Perhaps Steve Roach's "Structures form Silence " is an example.....the original release and the Projekt remastered release where the music was readdressed for a reason.

Returning to drone on's comment: I almost bought a remastered version of the original Stone Roses release on iTunes (my 7-year-old daughter is totally into it right now), but it didn't sound any better than my original vinyl copy. In fact, it almost sounded as if it were playing through a tin can.